Designers can supercharge their teams but helping them make better decisions faster. They do this by functioning in the three primary roles of facilitator (assisting others in refining and sharing ideas), steward (of a user centered creative process), and connoisseur (an expert arbiter of taste). Playing these three primary roles effectively in order to amplify your team's quality output and ethically succeed in business requires leadership. Without explicit authority, individual contributors must use influence to lead, just like the "leader" in a social dance.

In this talk, I'll take you through the qualities and habits of amazing social dance leaders and how they're the same as or analogous to those of effective designers. I talk about how things like clear expectations, unambiguous communication, adaptive styling, and responsive feedback characterize great leaders, on the dance floor and in the boardroom.